With the fast development of Internet at the end of last century, web has gradually becomes the mainstream for people to access information. Billions of people are using all different ways to go online such as by dial-up modem, DSL, T1, or cable modem. Various devices connecting to the Internet range from server computers, desktop PCs to mobile and embedded devices. Internet is now accessible almost anywhere, at anytime.
With the widespread of Internet and e-business, millions of companies and organizations have set up their own web servers and make it accessible to the public. There are also many search engines such as Yahoo, MSN or Google for the general public to search for information. Most contents in the Internet are HTML pages and accessed through HTTP protocols.
The majority usage of those web servers, including many online stores, is to provide one-way information from service providers to users, either casual readers or customers. Sometimes, servers interact with clients by means of survey forms, comments, discussion groups, category and production selection, and online payments. Those are two way communications between servers and clients; however, there are few web services that can provide interactions or collaborations among the users themselves.
Outside web servers, in the Internet, there are many other ways of for user interactions such as traditional bulletin board, the Usenet, on line chat (IRC) or even on line games. Recently instant messaging also joins this category. These services are typically dedicated to user interaction. Some are non-real time, some are real time. For example, online forums, bulletin boards or discussion groups allow users to share information, ask questions and get helps by posting threads. On-line chats, IRC or instant messengers allow instant communications among peoples.
A recent trend of those interaction services is to take the form of web sites by hosting them into web servers so people can use those services with a browser. Such as web chat, web discussion, collaboration service, or online communities. With those services, people can interact with other people when they browsed into those particular web servers such as some web portals.
However, there are still big gaps between the web and the users. Which is: the majority web users who access information in the Internet cannot interact with each other. There are no universal solutions to connect the community of users who access the majority information in the Internet.
From user's perspective, traditional web browsing or surfing the web is a solitary experience. The user digs into the web and searches for information, then the web site returns information. There is little or none interaction to other users who also accesses the same information. Even users can communicate to each other through online chat, instant messenger, these tools or services are segregated from the main web sites where the users are browsing. Communication between users is completely independent of users' browsing experience.
While there are several approaches to integrate chatting into web pages, no one can fully resolve the following problems. For example, there is no correlation between the information being accessed and the people who access the information; it is hard to connect those users even when they are making the same activities. Some web sites provide ways for users to review news or movies, send comments on some topics, enter discussion groups or forums from web pages, start online chat applets from within web pages, or even run instant messenger with a click of mouse. However, people are still forced to switch from one program to another or go change from one web page to another while they are browsing and chatting at the same time.
This invention, which changes people's navigation paradigm, is aiming at those inefficiencies in a way that try to resolve all those problems. It gives user the ability to communicate with others seamlessly when they are accessing information or using software. For example, interest matching, getting helps, finding reviews, or conducting any community activities that are not supported.
This invention originates to my other patent titled “Global sideband service distributed computing method” (U.S. Pat. No. 6,418,462) in 1998, users of one shared resource are organized in a cooperative way. They share some similarity if we view that providing dynamic information about the web page as a sideband service in addition to the main browsing service.
Later in 2000, when I started to provide software being used directly in the web, there is need to provide customer support for many users since many people do not know where to get help. Sharing the knowledge between users became my first idea. Traditional way of providing a discussion forum does not work well as people are lazy enough or un-reluctant to search for help, what they want is immediate feedback and helps. So came across the idea of letting people who are using the same software to form communities and can help each other, with the help of an extra software module. This is also another type of resource based virtual communities.